Anton Chekhov

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pages: 376 words: 91,192

Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations by Garson O'Toole

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, en.wikipedia.org, Honoré de Balzac, Internet Archive, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, New Journalism, ought to be enough for anybody, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Steve Jobs, Wayback Machine, Yogi Berra

Accessed in Google Books, https://goo.gl/epNgsd. 9. Michael Powell, ed., The Mammoth Book of Great British Humor (London: Constable and Robinson, 2010), 351. Accessed in Google Books, https://goo.gl/WKGhPY, and Amazon, https://goo.gl/5ZGXUt. A reader wrote to QI complaining that the above quotation had been attributed to Anton Chekhov, the Russian master of short stories and drama, but that he had acquired zero evidence to support this claim. “I even asked my Slavicist friend to look for it in the original Russian works, and she was unable to find it,” my client intoned. “Would you please examine its provenance?” QI believes that this quotation and ascription are mistaken.

The statement was ascribed, however, to the American dramatist Odets.2 A character in a Hollywood film of the 1950’s casually drops this line: “Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.” The screenplay was by Clifford Odets, America’s chief inheritor of the dramatic tradition of Anton Chekhov, and in that one line, he epitomized the lesson of his master. QI conjectures that the quotation above was constructed from a flawed memory of the line in The Country Girl. The textbook referred to a screenplay by Odets, but as noted previously, the screenplay was by Seaton, and the play by Odets.

An inattentive or confused reader might misunderstand the above excerpt and assign the quotation to Chekhov instead of Odets. The first instance of the misattribution to Chekhov that QI has found was printed in a 1981 compilation called The Fitzhenry and Whiteside Book of Quotations. No citation was specified for the quotation:4 Any idiot can face a crisis—it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out. —Anton Chekhov This influential reference work has been released in many editions and revised several times. The same quote is present in the 1986 enlarged edition of The Fitzhenry and Whiteside Book of Quotations and in the renamed 1987 edition of the Barnes and Noble Book of Quotations.5 These volumes act as powerful vectors for transmission of the statement coupled with the Chekhov ascription.


pages: 240 words: 65,363

Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, call centre, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fail fast, food miles, gamification, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, income inequality, information security, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, medical residency, Metcalfe’s law, microbiome, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sunk-cost fallacy, Tony Hsieh, transatlantic slave trade, Wayback Machine, éminence grise

All we’ve been doing in this book, really, is telling stories—about a hot-dog-eating champion, an ulcer detective, a man who wanted to give free surgery to the world’s poorest children. There are of course a million variations in how a given story can be told: the ratio of narrative to data; the pace and flow and tone; the point of the narrative arc at which you “cut into” the story, as the great writer-doctor Anton Chekhov noted. We have been telling these stories in an effort to persuade you to think like a Freak. Perhaps we haven’t been entirely successful, but the fact you have read this far suggests we haven’t failed altogether. In that case, we invite you to listen to one more story. It’s about a classic piece of advice that just about everyone has received at one point or another—and why you should ignore it.

The Brady Bunch: Drawn from a report by Kelton Research, “Motive Marketing: Ten Commandments Survey” (September 2007); and Reuters Wire, “Americans Know Big Macs Better Than Ten Commandments,” Reuters.com, October 12, 2007. 187 CONSIDER ONE MORE STORY FROM THE BIBLE: This can be found in II Samuel: 12. We are indebted to Jonathan Rosen for bringing to our attention how perfectly this story illustrated our point. Some of the words used to tell it here are his, as we could not improve upon them. 188 ANTON CHEKHOV AND WHERE TO “CUT INTO” A STORY: For this insight, we are indebted to a long-ago writing seminar taught by the great Richard Locke. CHAPTER 9: THE UPSIDE OF QUITTING 190 CHURCHILL AND “NEVER GIVE IN”: Transcript provided by the Churchill Centre at www.winstonchurchill.org. 190 “A QUITTER NEVER WINS, AND A WINNER NEVER QUITS”: In 1937, a self-help pundit named Napoleon Hill included that phrase in his very popular book Think and Grow Rich.


pages: 212 words: 68,754

Thinking in Numbers by Daniel Tammet

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, computer age, dematerialisation, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Paul Erdős, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Vilfredo Pareto

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 444 73742 4 Extract from The Lottery Ticket by Anton Chekhov; Extracts from Lolita by Vladamir Nabokov © Vladamir Nabokov, published by Orion Books is used by permission; Extract of interview with Vladamir Nabokov was taken from the BBC programme, Bookstand and is used with permission; Extracts by Julio Cortazar from Hopscotch, © Julio Cortazar, published by Random House New York; Quote from The Master’s Eye translated by Jean de la Fontaine; Quote from Under the Glacier by Halldor Laxness, © Halldor Laxness, published by Vintage Books, an imprint of Random House New York.

Lying, but talking and laughing and eating together. Lying instead of sitting. It was like a scene from a book that I had not read and that had not been written. How many such scenes are there to occupy our dreams, our lives, the pages of a book? Infinitely many. Like Elíasson’s sleepwriter, Anton Chekhov faithfully nurtured a little notebook throughout his remarkable career, though we can suppose that he used his mostly during waking hours. Filled with his day-to-day observations of existence’s minutiae, the pages preserve glimpses of ‘ordinary’ life’s infinite permutations. ‘Instead of sheets – dirty tablecloths.’


pages: 266 words: 80,018

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding

affirmative action, air gap, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, disinformation, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Firefox, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job-hopping, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, undersea cable, web application, WikiLeaks

During his trips to the airport he brought gifts. They included a Lonely Planet guide to Russia, and a guide to Moscow. The lawyer also selected several classics ‘to help Snowden understand the mentality of the Russian people’: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a collection of stories by Anton Chekhov, and writings by the historian Nikolai Karamzin. Snowden quickly polished off Crime and Punishment. After reading selections from Karamzin, a 19th-century writer who penned the first comprehensive history of the Russian state, he asked for the author’s complete works. Kucherena also gave him a book on the Cyrillic alphabet to help him learn Russian, and brought a change of clothes.

That involves a huge amount of scoping of material.’ The journalists who published the Snowden revelations had been involved in the most thrilling story of their careers. It was in the public interest. Now, it seemed, they were suspects. Epilogue: Exile Somewhere near Moscow 2014–? ‘Even in Siberia there is happiness.’ ANTON CHEKHOV, In Exile For nine weeks Edward Snowden was mostly invisible. There was the odd photo – of a young man pushing a shopping trolley across a Moscow street. (Surely a fake? The man looked nothing like him!) Another leaked image was more convincing. It showed Snowden on a tourist boat cruising along the Moscow River.


Ukraine by Lonely Planet

Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, gentrification, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, low cost airline, megacity, Skype, stakhanovite, Suez canal 1869, trade route

Siege mentality apart, Cupid is a lovely Lviv-styled knaypa (pub) with an attached bookshop – a favourite drinking den for nationalist-leaning and cosmopolitan bohemians alike. Palata No.6 Pub (Палата No.6; Ward No.6; 486 5152; vul Vorovskoho 31A; noon-2am; Universytet) For a healthy dose of insanity sneak into this well-hidden bar named after Anton Chekhov’s story about life in a madhouse. Dressed in doctors’ white robes, stern-looking waiters nurse you with excellent steaks (mains 40uah to 60uah) and with giant syringes pour vodka into your glass. A perfect cure for the maddening quotidian. Baraban Pub (Барабан ; Drum; Click here ; vul Prorizna 4A; beer 14uah, mains 40-60uah; 11am-11pm; Maydan Nezalezhnosti) This popular journo hang-out is hard to find, but a colourful cast of regulars manages to do so on a nightly basis.

Yalta ЯЛТА 0654 / pop 80,500 Yalta’s air – an invigorating blend of sea and pine forest sprinkled with mountain chill – has always been its main asset. Back in the 19th century, doctors in St Petersburg had one remedy for poor-lunged aristocrats: Yalta. That is how the Russian royal family and other dignitaries, such as playwright Anton Chekhov, ended up here. Old parts of Yalta are still full of modest and not-so-modest former dachas of the tsarist-era intelligentsia , while the coast around the city is dotted with the luxurious palaces of the aristocracy. But back in 1913, a Russian travel guide remarked that Yalta was a long way from the Riviera in terms of comforts and civilization.

Yalta Top Sights Lenin's EmbankmentB3 Sights 1Alexander Nevsky CathedralD2 2Catholic ChurchB2 3History MuseumC3 4Statue of LeninE3 Sleeping 5BristolF3 6KrymF3 7OreandaC4 8OtdykhG4 9Vremena GodaG2 10White EagleB2 Eating 11ApelsinC3 12Khutorok La MerF4 13NobuC4 14PelmennayaF4 15SmakC3 16Teatralnoye CaféD3 Drinking 17PintaF3 18PintaC3 Entertainment 19Chekhov Theatre of Russian DramaC3 Sights & Activities Chekhov House-Museum Museum (www.chekhov.com.ua; vul Kirova 112; adult/student 30/15uah; 10am-5pm, last entry 4.30pm Tue-Sun Jun-Sep, Wed-Sun Sep-May) With many of Yalta’s attractions a short distance away, the Chekhov House-Museum is the only must-see in town. It’s sort of The Cherry Orchard incarnate. Not only did Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) pen that classic play here, the lush garden would appeal to the most horticulturally challenged audience. A long-term tuberculosis sufferer, the great Russian dramatist spent much of his last five years in Yalta. He designed the white dacha and garden himself and when he wasn’t producing plays like Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, he was a legendary host and bon vivant , welcoming the Russian singer Feodor Chaliapin, composer Rachmaninov and writers Maxim Gorky and Leo Tolstoy.


How to Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey Into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers by Richard Cohen

Anton Chekhov, Bonfire of the Vanities, colonial rule, Honoré de Balzac, index card, Joan Didion, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, University of East Anglia

Do you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen, Super-Criminals and Lunatics; and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science?” And finally: “Will you honor the King’s English?” One author who would never have made the club, had it been instituted in his day, was Anton Chekhov, who in 1884 employed a narrator who turns out to be the murderer in a 180-page melodrama, The Shooting Party, his one novel. *4 I admit this is my interpretation. Is the governess in fact mad, or is she correct in thinking that her two young charges are consorting with a pair of malevolent spirits?

Writing well is a matter of getting the balance right—between getting the ideal word or phrase and working the text too hard so that it appears self-conscious or labored; between saying enough for the reader to understand and saying not too much; making sure the reader attends to the song, not the singer. So much of revision is small changes and knowing when and what to omit. Hemingway once wryly observed that half of what he wrote he left out. Anton Chekhov, besieged by writers wanting his opinion on their work, would advise them all, “Cut, cut, cut!” “Writing a book is like building a coral reef,” P. G. Wodehouse considered. “One goes on adding tiny bits. I must say the result is much better. With my stuff it is largely a matter of adding color and seeing that I don’t let anything through that’s at all flat.”


pages: 51 words: 14,616

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels

Anton Chekhov, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, means of production, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois

Barrie, 0-553-21178-1 BRADBURY CLASSIC STORIES, Ray Bradbury, 0-553-28637-4 THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, Ray Bradbury, 0-553-27822-3 JANE EYRE, Charlotte Brontë, 0-553-21140-4 VILLETTE, Charlotte Brontë, 0-553-21243-5 WUTHERING HEIGHTS, Emily Brontë, 0-553-21258-3 THE SECRET GARDEN, Frances Hodgson Burnett, 0-553-21201-X ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND & THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS, Lewis Carroll, 0-553-21345-8 MY ÁNTONIA, Willa Cather, 0-553-21418-7 O PIONEERS!, Willa Cather, 0-553-21358-X THE CANTERBURY TALES, Geoffrey Chaucer, 0-553-21082-3 STORIES, Anton Chekhov, 0-553-38100-8 THE AWAKENING, Kate Chopin, 0-553-21330-X THE WOMAN IN WHITE, Wilkie Collins, 0-553-21263-X HEART OF DARKNESS and THE SECRET SHARER, Joseph Conrad, 0-553-21214-1 LORD JIM, Joseph Conrad, 0-553-21361-X THE DEERSLAYER, James Fenimore Cooper, 0-553-21085-8 THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, James Fenimore Cooper, 0-553-21329-6 MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS AND OTHER SHORT FICTION, Stephen Crane, 0-553-21355-5 THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, Stephen Crane, 0-553-21011-4 INFERNO, Dante, 0-553-21339-3 PARADISO, Dante, 0-553-21204-4 PURGATORIO, Dante, 0-553-21344-X THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, Charles Darwin, 0-553-21463-2 MOLL FLANDERS, Daniel Defoe, 0-553-21328-8 ROBINSON CRUSOE, Daniel Defoe, 0-553-21373-3 BLEAK HOUSE, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21223-0 A CHRISTMAS CAROL, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21244-3 DAVID COPPERFIELD, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21189-7 GREAT EXPECTATIONS, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21342-3 HARD TIMES, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21016-5 OLIVER TWIST, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21102-1 THE PICKWICK PAPERS, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21123-4 A TALE OF TWO CITIES, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21176-5 THREE SOLDIERS, John Dos Passos, 0-553-21456-X THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21216-8 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21175-7 THE ETERNAL HUSBAND AND OTHER STORIES, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21444-6 THE IDIOT, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21352-0 NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21144-7 SHERLOCK HOLMES VOL I, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 0-553-21241-9 SHERLOCK HOLMES VOL II, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 0-553-21242-7 SISTER CARRIE, Theodore Dreiser, 0-553-21374-1 THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, W.


pages: 88 words: 26,706

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right by Michael Brooks

4chan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Bernie Sanders, capitalist realism, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Flynn Effect, gun show loophole, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trolley problem, universal basic income, upwardly mobile

But to underline the larger point I am trying to make: Instead of policing each other’s influences and enjoyments for evidence of “cultural appropriation,” we should all strive to emulate the curiosity and rigor of the great Christian revolutionary intellectual Cornel West, who explores the echoes between Anton Chekhov and the blues with no interest in drawing artificial lines between cultures. In making this point, I’m not claiming that there is nothing wrong with some of the things people have labeled “cultural appropriation.” Jay-Z was absolutely right to get “what they did to the Cold Crush”—and to get himself on the cover of Fortune Magazine.


pages: 544 words: 168,076

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, asset allocation, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kitchen Debate, linear programming, lost cosmonauts, market clearing, MITM: man-in-the-middle, New Journalism, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, profit motive, RAND corporation, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method

For a general exploration of what Soviet intellectuals under Khrushchev knew about the world, see Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 7 But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture: for Marx’s vision of the alienated dance of the commodities, and its philosophical roots and imaginative implications, see Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (New York, 1940), ch. 15, and Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, pp. 226–74. 8 Machine-Tractor Station: the rural depots, with their own specialised workforce, where the equipment for mechanised farming was kept (until Khrushchev disastrously sold the machinery to the collective farms, which had no budget to maintain it). For the sorry history of Soviet agriculture, see Alec Nove, Economic History of the USSR, 1917–1991, final edition (London, 1992). 9 It looked like the set for some Chekhov story: specifically, ‘Peasants’, in Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896– 1904, translated by Ronald Wilks (London: Penguin, 2004) – though Emil appears to be thinking of ‘Gooseberries’ in the same collection. See also Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (New York: Random House, 2001). A portrait of Soviet peasant life more contemporary with Emil’s walk (but no less depressing) is Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Matryona’s House’, in Matryona’s House and Other Stories, translated by Michael Glenny (London: Penguin, 1975). 10 A good Kazan Muslim: the implication here is that, at least on his father’s side, Emil Arslanovich is a Tatar.

For a general exploration of what Soviet intellectuals under Khrushchev knew about the world, see Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 7 But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture: for Marx’s vision of the alienated dance of the commodities, and its philosophical roots and imaginative implications, see Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (New York, 1940), ch. 15, and Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, pp. 226–74. 8 Machine-Tractor Station: the rural depots, with their own specialised workforce, where the equipment for mechanised farming was kept (until Khrushchev disastrously sold the machinery to the collective farms, which had no budget to maintain it). For the sorry history of Soviet agriculture, see Alec Nove, Economic History of the USSR, 1917–1991, final edition (London, 1992). 9 It looked like the set for some Chekhov story: specifically, ‘Peasants’, in Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896– 1904, translated by Ronald Wilks (London: Penguin, 2004) – though Emil appears to be thinking of ‘Gooseberries’ in the same collection. See also Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (New York: Random House, 2001). A portrait of Soviet peasant life more contemporary with Emil’s walk (but no less depressing) is Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Matryona’s House’, in Matryona’s House and Other Stories, translated by Michael Glenny (London: Penguin, 1975). 10 A good Kazan Muslim: the implication here is that, at least on his father’s side, Emil Arslanovich is a Tatar.

Kiselyova, The Collapse of the Soviet Union: The View from the Information Society (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1995) Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Volume III: End of Millennium (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) Martin Cave, Computers and Economic Planning: The Soviet Experience (Cambridge: CUP, 1980) Janet G. Chapman, Real Wages in Soviet Russia Since 1928, RAND Corporation report R-371-PR (Santa Monica CA, October 1963) Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896–1904, translated by Ronald Wilks (London: Penguin, 2004) L. G. Churchward, The Soviet Intelligentsia: An Essay on the Social Structure and Roles of Soviet Intellectuals During the 1960s (London: RKP, 1973) Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror- Famine (London: Pimlico, 2002) Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler, translated by Hugh Aplin (London: Hesperus Press, 2006) Vera S.


pages: 383 words: 118,458

The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux

Anton Chekhov, British Empire, drop ship, Ford Model T, Khyber Pass, means of production, Occam's razor, South China Sea, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, working poor

Aziz Nesin, who was across the room mournfully nibbling an American embassy vol-au-vent, has written fifty-eight books. Most are collections of short stories. They are said to be hilarious, but none has been translated into English. 'I have no doubt about it,' Yashar said. 'Aziz Nesin is a greater comic writer than Anton Chekhov!' Aziz Nesin, hearing his name, looked up and smiled sadly. 'Come to my house,' said Yashar. 'We go swimming, eh? Eat some fish? I will tell you the whole story.' 'How will I find your house?' I had asked Yashar the previous day. He said, 'Ask any child. The old people don't know me, but all the little ones do.

I said I was an admirer of Zamyatin, but they had not heard of the author of We (a novel that inspired Orwell to write 1984, which it resembles), who died in Paris in the twenties trying to write a biography of Attila the Hun. I asked if there were any novelists in Khabarovsk. 'Chekhov was here,' said Nastasya. In 1890, Anton Chekhov visited Sakhalin, an island of convicts, 700 miles from Khabarovsk. But in Siberia all distances are relative: Sakhalin was right next door. 'Who else do you like?' I asked. Nastasya said, 'Now you want to ask me about Solzhenitsyn.' 'I wasn't going to,' I said. 'But since you mentioned him, what do you think?'


Little Failure: A Memoir by Gary Shteyngart

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, East Village, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Yom Kippur War, young professional

While I will retain my Russian, my parents will struggle with the new language, nothing being more instructive than having a child prattle on in English at the dinner table. Not to mention that after borrowing $9,600 for one floor of 252-67 Sixty-Third Avenue we cannot afford a television, so instead of The Dukes of Hazzard, I turn to the collected works of Anton Chekhov, eight battered volumes of which still sit on my bookshelves. Without television there is absolutely nothing to talk about with any of the children at school. It turns out these little porkers have very little interest in “Gooseberries” or “Lady with Lapdog,” and it is impossible in the early 1980s to hear a sentence spoken by a child without an allusion to something shown on TV.

My parents aren’t telling me to become a writer—everyone knows that immigrant children have to go into law, medicine, or maybe that strange new category known only as “computer”—but placing the bookcase in my room sends the unmistakable message that I am our family’s future and that I have to be the best of the best. Which I will be, Mama and Papa, I swear. The bookcase contains the collected works of Anton Chekhov in eight dark blue volumes with the author’s seagull-like signature across every volume’s cover, and most of the collected works of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Pushkin. In front of the Russian greats stands a siddur (the Jewish daily prayer book), enclosed in a plastic case and coated with fake silver and fake emeralds.


pages: 251 words: 44,888

The Words You Should Know to Sound Smart: 1200 Essential Words Every Sophisticated Person Should Be Able to Use by Bobbi Bly

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, Columbine, Donald Trump, George Santayana, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, Joan Didion, John Nash: game theory, Network effects, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, school vouchers, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, three-masted sailing ship

Cutting the branches off a neighbor’s tree that went over the fence into your yard is, at most, a TORT, not a felony. tortuous (TORE-chew-us), adjective Intricate and indirect; not straightforward. “[Critics] don’t know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hard and TORTUOUS to write a bad one.” – Anton Chekhov, Russian dramatist totem (TOH-tuhm), noun Anything that serves as a venerated symbol. Our various formal and informal gardens are TOTEMS to our emphasis on the importance of the natural world. tout (TOWT), verb To publicize in a boastful, extravagant manner. Eloise TOUTED the excellence of her family’s new personal chef to a gauche and distasteful degree.


pages: 171 words: 51,276

Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe by Marcus Chown

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Carrington event, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, gravity well, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

Since such a space technology is still over the horizon, we will simply have to keep our fingers crossed that we are not as unlucky as the dinosaurs. And ponder what we would do if we suddenly realized we had only ten seconds to live! 14. SECRET OF SUNLIGHT Contrary to expectations, the earth does not have an energy crisis “Only entropy comes easy.” —ANTON CHEKHOV HOW MUCH ENERGY DOES the earth trap from the sun? The answer is, surprisingly, none. All of the solar energy intercepted by our planet is radiated back into space.1 Were this not the case, the earth would simply get ever hotter until its surface became a molten goo. So, if it is not solar energy that is ultimately powering every living thing on Earth, not to mention our global technological civilization, what is it?


pages: 219 words: 51,207

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton

Anton Chekhov, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley

(illustration credit 4.12) Our favourite secular books do not alert us to how inadequate a one-off linear reading of them will prove. They do not identify the particular days of the year on which we ought to reconsider them, as the holy books do – in the latter case with 200 others around us and an organ playing in the background. There is arguably as much wisdom to be found in the stories of Anton Chekhov as in the Gospels, but collections of the former are not bound with calendars reminding readers to schedule a regular review of their insights. We would face grave accusations of eccentricity if we attempted to construct liturgies from the works of secular authors. At best, we haphazardly underline a few of the sentences that we most admire in them and which we may once in a while chance upon in an idle moment waiting for a taxi.


pages: 222 words: 53,317

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

We find it in the Greek pantheon, and in many other stories we tell ourselves. Storytelling, in fact, allows us to indulge our desires for either biological or physics thinking. Some stories are finely crafted machines with no extraneous parts; everything fits together. We see this in “Chekhov’s Gun,” dramatist Anton Chekhov’s principle that any element introduced in a story must be crucial to advancing the plot. A loaded rifle introduced early in the first act of a play must go off by the third. On the other hand, there are some stories in which color is added, creating a richness of experience without necessarily moving the plot along.


pages: 648 words: 165,654

Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East by Robin Wright

Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, colonial rule, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, power law, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment

And when they imprisoned me for six years, the cost was higher to them.” EIGHT IRAN The Reactionaries If you cry “Forward!” you must without fail make plain in what direction to go. Don’t you see that if, without doing so, you call out the word to both a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in directions precisely opposite? —RUSSIAN PLAYWRIGHT ANTON CHEKHOV The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. —AMERICAN POLITICAL THEORIST HANNAH ARENDT Islam’s priests will wield enormous political influence during the Middle East’s turbulent transitions. Many already do. They fill a void created by the imprisonment, exile, or execution of secular democrats and other opponents.

“So many people thought the conservatives might at least be able to do something economically.” Many Iranians did not initially take Ahmandinejad seriously. Some saw him as a bit of a bumpkin. As mayor, he had banned billboard ads featuring Western celebrities, such as British soccer star David Beckham. He closed down cultural centers that had performed the works of Arthur Miller, Anton Chekhov, and Victor Hugo and converted them into religious education centers. Tehran’s ever-frenzied grapevine speculated that he would segregate, by sex, all public elevators, parks, and even sidewalks. An Iranian friend recounted a joke that had Ahmadinejad standing in front of a mirror combing his hair and repeating, “OK, male lice to the left, female lice to the right.”


pages: 249 words: 81,217

The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age by Claudia Hammond

Abraham Maslow, Anton Chekhov, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, iterative process, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, overview effect, Stephen Hawking, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen

Of course, if you are hoping for distraction not every book will suffice. In a study where people suffering from chronic pain read short stories or poems in a group, it was the most challenging and thought-provoking literature which the participants found best distracted them from their agonies. The more intriguing and puzzling the story, such as those by Anton Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence and Raymond Carver, the more absorbed they felt, and the less they noticed their pain.17 Nell divided his ludic readers into two types: those who read to escape from their world, who blotted out all thoughts of what was going in their lives; and those who did the opposite, who wanted to heighten their own consciousness and used reading about the lives of others as a way of reflecting on their own.


pages: 255 words: 92,719

All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work by Joanna Biggs

Anton Chekhov, bank run, banking crisis, Bullingdon Club, call centre, Chelsea Manning, credit crunch, David Graeber, Desert Island Discs, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial independence, future of work, G4S, glass ceiling, industrial robot, job automation, land reform, low skilled workers, mittelstand, Northern Rock, payday loans, Right to Buy, scientific management, Second Machine Age, Sheryl Sandberg, six sigma, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, wages for housework, Wall-E

First published in 2015 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd 3 Holford Yard Bevin Way London WC1X 9HD www.serpentstail.com eISBN 978 1 78283 014 6 To Mum IRINA: A time will come when everyone will know what all this is for, why there is this misery; there will be no mysteries and, meanwhile, we have got to live … we have got to work, only to work! Tomorrow I’ll go alone; I’ll teach in the school, and I’ll give all my life to those who may need me. Now it’s autumn; soon winter will come and cover us with snow, and I will work, I will work. Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters CONTENTS IN DOVER MAKING: potter, shoemaker, robot SELLING: fishmonger, creative director, councillor, homesteader, legal aid lawyer SERVING: sex worker, baristas, call centre adviser, special adviser LEADING: company director, stay-at-home mum, hereditary lord ENTERTAINING: dancer, footballer, giggle doctor THINKING: scientist, question writer, professor CARING: care worker, cleaner, crofter REPAIRING: rabbi, army major, nurse STARTING: apprentice, intern, technologist, unemployed, on workfare AT SCHOOL References Acknowledgements IN DOVER IN THE COLD BACK ROOM of a charity shop, a group of volunteers are working.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Attending investors probably believed that his closeness to his successor might provide valuable insights into the Fed's future policy. The sixty-year-old Bernanke gave the impression that he did not expect official rates to increase to their long-term average of around 4 percent in his lifetime. There is in fact little agreement on the appropriate policy response. As Russian playwright and doctor Anton Chekhov wrote in The Cherry Orchard, “If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure.”22 Policymakers are making it up as they go along. The measures are basically of limited use but are presented to a credulous public as sound policy. At the start of the GFC, the choice was always pain now or agony later.


pages: 340 words: 94,464

Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World by Andrew Leigh

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, Atul Gawande, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Indoor air pollution, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microcredit, Netflix Prize, nudge unit, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, price mechanism, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, statistical model, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty

The trial was a success, and streptomycin today remains one of the drugs that is used to treat tuberculosis. In the past two centuries alone, tuberculosis has killed more than 1 billion people – more than the combined toll from all the wars and famines in that time.13 Among the victims of ‘the white plague’ were Frédéric Chopin, Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, Emily Brontë, George Orwell and Eleanor Roosevelt. Today, tuberculosis still accounts for more than a million deaths worldwide each year. Strains of the disease that are resistant to streptomycin and other antibiotics are becoming increasingly prevalent. Austin Bradford Hill didn’t eliminate the disease that nearly killed him.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

See Gary Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964). The use of “leaved” and “conceived” borrows from Philip Larkin, “Long Lion Days,” in Larkin, The Complete Poems, 323. “devours everything in its path”: See Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, in Anton Chekhov, Plays, trans. Elisaveta Fen (New York: Viking Penguin, 1959), 363. “Human Capital Management”: Kevin Roose, Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2014), 35, and “Human Capital Management,” Goldman Sachs, accessed July 16, 2018, www.goldmansachs.com/careers/divisions/human-capital-management/.


The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture by Orlando Figes

Anton Chekhov, British Empire, Charles Babbage, glass ceiling, global village, Honoré de Balzac, Internet Archive, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Journalism, Open Library, Republic of Letters, Suez canal 1869, wikimedia commons

Pianistically trite with brilliant effects that were not hard to play, the piece remained a bestseller until the beginning of the twentieth century, when it became a symbol of provincial mediocrity (‘And tomorrow morning I won’t have to listen to that “Maiden’s Prayer” any more,’ says Irina, bound for Moscow, in the final act of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, as its saccharine melody wafts into the garden from a drawing-room).89 Louise Farrenc (1804–75) and Louise Bertin (1805–77) were exceptional in overcoming the obstacles preventing women from composing music in larger forms – Farrenc wrote orchestral works, Bertin operas – but they had considerable advantages.

Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 56–7; Borchard, ‘“Ma chère petite Clara”’, p. 136. 86. Anna Eugénie Schoen-René, America’s Musical Inheritance (New York, 1941), p. 134. 87. BMO, NLA 357, Pauline Viardot to Henri Heugel, 21 Feb. 1882. 88. Marix-Spire, ‘Vicissitudes d’un opera-comique’, p. 66. 89. Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters, in Plays, trans. Peter Carson (London, 2002), p. 265. 90. François-Joseph Fétis, Biographie universelle des musiciens et bibliographie générale de la musique: Supplément et complément (Paris, 1878), p. 314. See further, Bea Friedland, Louise Farrenc, 1804–1875: Composer, Performer, Scholar (Ann Arbor, 1980). 91.


pages: 350 words: 103,988

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

At the time it was controversial: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” AT&T’s supporters said. Hindsight shows the antitrust authorities were right to intervene, as the breakup of AT&T quickened innovation and lowered long-distance prices. Competition can be liberating. In The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov conveys the thrill of winning. The estate of impoverished aristocrats (the cherry orchard of the title) was auctioned off. Lopakhin, a businessman of humble origins, described the bidding: “I bid forty. Him—forty-five. Me—fifty-five. So he’s going up in fives, me in tens…Well that was that. I bid the mortgage plus ninety, and there it stayed.


pages: 346 words: 101,255

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters by Rose George

American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anton Chekhov, Bob Geldof, Celtic Tiger, clean water, glass ceiling, indoor plumbing, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, land reform, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pepto Bismol, Potemkin village, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Steven Pinker, urban planning

The great architect Le Corbusier considered the toilet to be “one of the most beautiful objects industry has ever invented”; and Rudyard Kipling found sewers more compelling than literature. Drains are “a great and glorious thing,” he wrote in 1886, “and I study ’em and write about ’em when I can.” A decent primer on sanitary engineering, he wrote, “is worth more than all the tomes of sacred smut ever produced.” Anton Chekhov was moved to write about the dreadful sanitation in the far-eastern Russian isle of Sakhalin. And Sigmund Freud thought the study of excretion essential and its neglect a stupidity. In the foreword to Scatologic Rites of All Nations, an impressive ethnography of excrement by the amateur anthropologist—and U.S. army captain—John Bourke, Freud wrote that “to make [the role of excretions in human life] more accessible . . . is not only a courageous but also a meritorious undertaking.”


pages: 401 words: 108,855

Cultureshock Paris by Cultureshock Staff

Anton Chekhov, clean water, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Louis Pasteur, money market fund, PalmPilot, QWERTY keyboard, Skype, telemarketer, urban renewal, young professional

No matter what you wish to watch, you’ll probably find it, from international classics in elegant and historical surroundings to offbeat performances in funky, non-mainstream storefronts. The Comédie Française itself now performs at three venues (see its website), with an expanded repertoire ranging from the classics of Molière, Racine and Corneille to works by playwrights such as William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett and Anton Chekhov. These are performed in French of course, although there are performances in the original language from time to time. For current and upcoming productions at some 60 theatres in all parts of the city, access www. canaltheatre.com. La Cartoucherie in the beautiful Bois de Vincennes at the eastern edge of Paris is a complex of eight theatres, staging an imaginative range of international works, both classics and avant-garde.


pages: 347 words: 112,727

Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Anton Chekhov, computer age, David Brooks, digital map, Exxon Valdez, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Golden Gate Park, index card, Isaac Newton, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, pez dispenser, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

Where the Streets Are Paved with Zinc 8. Ten Thousand Mustachioed Men 9. Pigging the Pipe 10. Between Snake Oil and Rolexes 11. The Future Epilogue Photographs Acknowledgments About Jonathan Waldman For Mom and Dad, and whoever bought that stupid sailboat Only entropy comes easy. —ANTON CHEKHOV PREFACE: A JANKY OLD BOAT They say a lot of things about boats. They say a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into. They say boat stands for “bring out another thousand.” They say that the pleasures of owning and sailing a boat are comparable to standing, fully clothed, in a cold shower while tearing up twenty-dollar bills.


pages: 341 words: 116,854

The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub

Anton Chekhov, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, fear of failure, gentrification, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, plutocrats, price mechanism, rent control, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

He had invented something he called Super-Theatrics, based on the insight that “you could deejay or sample any style of theater onto any text.” One of his first productions at Show World was Pervy Verse, which he described as “a retelling of The Bacchae in fetish gear.” He put on a production of Waiting for Godot, as well as all twelve of Anton Chekhov’s early comedies, which Chekhov had called vaudevilles. He staged a “Ridicu-fest” to honor Ludlam’s work. Nada Show World’s first hit was God of Vengeance, a 1910 Yiddish play by Sholem Asch that takes place in a brothel. The play had attracted a supremely odd combination of blue-haired ladies and Hasidic Jews; the latter invariably arrived without their identifying hat or overcoat, for God of Vengeance was a notorious play that had been banned for blasphemy.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

As entropy increases, things become more randomly arranged. If left to continue forever, this eventually leads to an evenly distributed system, a completely randomly arranged system—clothes and toys anywhere and everywhere! In a closed system, like our kids’ rooms, entropy doesn’t just decrease on its own. Russian playwright Anton Chekhov put it like this: “Only entropy comes easy.” If our kids don’t make an effort to clean up, the room just gets messier and messier. The natural increase of entropy over time in a closed system is known as the second law of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is the study of heat. If you consider our universe as the biggest closed system, this law leads to a plausible end state of our universe as a homogenous gas, evenly distributed everywhere, commonly known as the heat death of the universe.


pages: 500 words: 115,119

Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, geopolitical risk, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mega-rich, megacity, open borders, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 Pirenne, Mohammed & Charlemagne, p. 120. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 4 (New York: Everyman’s Library, [1776–1788] 1910), p. 160. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Anton Chekhov, “A Dreary Story,” in My Life and Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Everyman’s Library, [1889] 1992). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (New York: SophiaOmni, [1912] 2014), pp. 163 and 216. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 T.


pages: 481 words: 121,300

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism by Harm J. De Blij

agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial exploitation, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, John Snow's cholera map, Khyber Pass, manufacturing employment, megacity, megaproject, Mercator projection, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

As Figure 11-3 shows, the Russian Far East incorporates one real island, named Sakhalin, and this is an important component of this region's physical as well as cultural geography. From the mid-nineteenth century on, the Russians and the Japanese repeatedly fought over Sakhalin Island, and not until the end of World War II was Soviet control confirmed. When the Russians held it, they used Sakhalin as a penal colony (the great writer Anton Chekhov in one of his books described the terrible conditions under which prisoners lived), but during Soviet times Sakhalin became an increasingly important source of fuels ranging from oil in the north to coal in the south. In post-Soviet years additional finds of oil reserves have made Sakhalin Island a key constituent of the commodity-based Russian economy.


pages: 449 words: 127,440

Moscow, December 25th, 1991 by Conor O'Clery

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, haute couture, It's morning again in America, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, Sinatra Doctrine, The Chicago School

On Moscow television on November 30 Yeltsin said he could not imagine a union without Ukraine, but that Russia could not sign a union treaty if Ukraine didn’t. The die was cast. The Soviet president could not bring himself to believe that Ukraine would vote for independence. Most Russians felt they and Ukrainians were politically and culturally of the same stock—Slavs descended from the once united Rus people. Classic Russian writers like Anton Chekhov and Mikhail Bulgakov placed their tales in Ukraine. Gogol and Shevchenko were born there. So too was Brezhnev. Gorbachev and his wife both had Ukrainian blood. They believed Ukraine was to Russia what Bavaria was to Germany. It had been part of greater Russia since the “Eternal Peace” between Russia and Poland three centuries earlier, when Kiev and the Cossack lands east of the Dnieper went over to Russian rule.


pages: 412 words: 128,042

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

Art is a particular example of a general rule: pick any arena – from science and engineering to literature and culture – and this city is the origin of an innovation that changed the way we see the world. The units we use to measure both temperature (Kelvin) and power (Watt) take their names from Glaswegian inventors. In addition to cutting-edge art the city’s many theatres were known for supporting challenging new work by Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen. It was a connected and dense city with travel made easy thanks to the 1896 launch of the world’s third – and most advanced – underground train. In 1927 a local inventor linked cameras in London to a screen in Glasgow’s Central Hotel, creating the world’s first television broadcast.


pages: 578 words: 131,346

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbnb, Anton Chekhov, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Broken windows theory, call centre, data science, David Graeber, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Easter island, experimental subject, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Garrett Hardin, Hans Rosling, invention of writing, invisible hand, knowledge economy, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nocebo, placebo effect, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey

This Is What Democracy Looks Like PART 5 THE OTHER CHEEK 16. Drinking Tea with Terrorists 17. The Best Remedy for Hate, Injustice and Prejudice 18. When the Soldiers Came Out of the Trenches Epilogue Acknowledgements Notes Index A Note on the Author ‘Man will become better when you show him what he is like.’ Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) PROLOGUE On the eve of the Second World War, the British Army Command found itself facing an existential threat. London was in grave danger. The city, according to a certain Winston Churchill, formed ‘the greatest target in the world, a kind of tremendous fat cow, a valuable fat cow tied up to attract the beasts of prey’.1 The beast of prey was, of course, Adolf Hitler and his war machine.


pages: 412 words: 121,164

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, digital nomad, Donald Trump, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, Jessica Bruder, Khartoum Gordon, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nomadland, open borders, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, spinning jenny, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, traveling salesman

China’s great North Plain runs from the Yan Mountains to the Tongbai and Dabie mountains and has been the centre of Han culture since the earliest days. But most significant for my story of nomads is the Great Eurasian Steppe. ‘A wide boundless plain encircled by a chain of low hills’21 is how Anton Chekhov describes the steppes. ‘Huddling together and peeping out from behind one another, these hills melted together into rising ground, which stretched right to the very horizon and disappeared into the lilac distance; one drives on and on and cannot discern where it begins or where it ends.’ For once, this is not writer’s hyperbole: Eurasia accounts for over a third of the planet’s landmass and its overwhelming vastness, one of the steppes’ most dominant features, really does run ‘on and on’.


pages: 476 words: 139,761

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis

active measures, Anton Chekhov, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, failed state, fake news, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Julian Assange, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, WikiLeaks

Cast of Characters In London Nigel Wilkins Head of compliance at the London office of the Swiss bank BSI, later on the staff of the City of London regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority Charlotte Martin Nigel’s companion Trefor Williams Ex-UK special forces, investigator at the private intelligence firm Diligence Ron Wahid Bangladeshi-American founder of the private intelligence firm Arcanum Neil Gerrard Lawyer at the City firm Dechert The Trio Alexander Machkevitch aka Sasha Kyrgyz-born member of the Trio of Central Asian billionaires behind Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) Patokh Chodiev Uzbek-born member of the Trio Alijan Ibragimov Kyrgyz-Uighur member of the Trio Mehmet Dalman British-Cypriot City financier, ENRC director then chairman Victor Hanna The Trio’s man in Africa Shawn McCormick Ex-US intelligence official hired by ENRC The khan Nursultan Nazarbayev Ruler of Kazakhstan since 1989, president until 2019 then chair of the Security Council Rakhat Aliyev aka Sugar Nazarbayev’s son-in-law, later in exile Timur Kulibayev Nazarbayev’s other son-in-law, billionaire Kenes Rakishev Kulibayev’s protégé The oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov Kazakh ex-minister, tycoon and founder of BTA Bank Peter Sahlas Canadian lawyer retained by Ablyazov Madina Ablyazova Ablyazov’s daughter, in Geneva Iliyas Khrapunov Madina’s husband Leila Khrapunova Kazakh businesswoman, Iliyas’s mother Viktor Khrapunov Kazakh politician, Iliyas’s stepfather Bota Jardemalie Harvard-trained Kazakh lawyer at BTA Bank The gangsters Semyon Mogilevich aka Seva aka the Brainy Don Moscow’s premier criminal moneyman Sergei Mikhailov aka Mikhas Boss of the Solntsevskaya Bratva, a Russian crime syndicate In Africa Billy Rautenbach Zimbabwean businessman, backer of Robert Mugabe’s regime Robert Mugabe Ruler of Zimbabwe, 1980–2017 Emmerson Mnangagwa aka the Crocodile Mugabe’s security chief, then successor Joseph Kabila President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, 2001–2019 Augustin Katumba Mwanke Kabila’s right-hand man, died in 2012 Dan Gertler Israeli mining tycoon close to Kabila and Katumba In North America Felix Sater Russian-American fraudster, money launderer, spy and real estate developer Tevfik Arif Kazakh founder of the New York real estate venture where Sater worked, Bayrock Boris Birshtein Soviet-era moneyman residing in Toronto Alex Shnaider Russian-Canadian billionaire, Birshtein’s protégé and, for a time, son-in-law Epigraph Every man lives his real, most interesting life under cover of secrecy Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Dog Part I Crisis The secret of a great fortune with no apparent cause is a crime that has been forgotten because it was done properly Honoré de Balzac, Old Goriot 1 The Thief Kensington, January 2008 Moral courage, yes, but it was also mischief, a quality discernible in the creases at the corners of his eyes, that made Nigel Wilkins decide to steal the secrets of a Swiss bank.


pages: 643 words: 131,673

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, George Santayana, germ theory of disease, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megastructure, minimum viable product, moveable type in China, placebo effect, safety bicycle, sugar pill, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

Kilns show up around 6000 BCE, but there is nothing preventing you from constructing them at any given point in history, except knowing how to do it. And since you just learned how to do that, you’ve got no excuse for waiting! Do it right now!* 10.4.3: GLASS Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. —You (also, Anton Chekhov) WHAT IT IS A strong, heat-resistant, nonreactive, infinitely recyclable noncrystalline amorphous solid* that you can see through, which actually makes it one of the most insanely useful substances on the planet BEFORE IT WAS INVENTED If you needed corrective lenses, you wouldn’t get them and would instead spend your entire life not seeing things clearly.


pages: 976 words: 329,519

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

Fires could of course be started deliberately: an analysis of 114 cases of rural arson in Bavaria between 1879 and 1900 has shown how these surprisingly frequent crimes were motivated by feelings of resentment against mean farmers or brutal employers, older brothers inheriting the property, abusive parents, or revenge for real or imagined slights. One man accused of setting fire to the family mill after it had been inherited by his older brother confessed: ‘I committed the arson … because I was angry with my brother because he treated me and my mother badly.’ The playwright Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) began his sketch of rural life, Muzhiki, published in 1897, with a village fire, portraying the male peasants standing around dumbfounded with ‘a helpless expression and tears in their eyes’, while the women of the village ran around crying hysterically, or wailing ‘as if they were at a funeral’.

The best-selling of these ‘boulevard newspapers’ was the Moscow Sheet, whose editor Nicholas Pastukhov (1831–1911), a former innkeeper described by one of his own journalists as an ‘illiterate editor who in the midst of illiterate readers … knew how to speak their language’. A rival penny paper in St Petersburg was dismissed in 1870 as ‘a sort of junkyard of all sorts of rumours, gossip, and news’. The young writer Anton Chekhov was told by his editor that ‘we’ll grab the readers with stupidities and then instruct them with learned articles’. In practice, the latter continued to be in short supply. In France local newspapers began to be produced from the 1870s onwards, though they were read mainly by the middle classes at first; in 1896, however, the police described one such paper, L’Avenir du Cantal, as ‘much read by the peasant’.


pages: 1,150 words: 338,839

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made by Walter Isaacson, Evan Thomas

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, George Santayana, guns versus butter model, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, uranium enrichment, éminence grise

Hoping to write a biography of the great nineteenth-century writer, Kennan read all thirty volumes of his works and six volumes of his “inimitable” letters. “There could, as it happened, have been no finer grounding in the atmosphere of prerevolutionary Russia,” he later noted. He sent unsolicited to the Yale Review an article titled “Anton Chekhov and the Bolsheviks.” Said the State Department officer charged with clearing the essay: “If Yale can stand it, I can.” Yale apparently could not. Citing his desire to study the Chekhov archives, Kennan applied for permission to visit Moscow in the summer of 1932. The State Department denied the request, declaring that the young Russian specialists should visit that country only when they could do so in an official capacity.

.: appearance of, 85, 86, 697 articles by, 55–56, 368, 580, 673, 708 athletic abilities of, 86–87 Bohlen and, 493, 494, 499, 512–13, 529–30, 720–21 books by, 89, 590 childhood and heritage of, 50–54 death of, 719 early employment of, 56–57, 85 essays by, 55–56 Harriman and, 22, 40, 85–86, 135, 463–64, 500–11, 519–20, 532, 540–41, 546–48, 583–85, 598, 601, 606, 610–11, 634–35, 681–83, 692–93, 708–9, 715, 719 health problems of, 558, 649–50, 718 independence of, 53, 54–55, 131–32, 465 intelligence of, 87, 131, 132 journal of, 126 Kennan, and, 327–28, 471–72, 474, 477, 485, 487–91, 495–96, 499, 512, 529–30, 542–43, 551–53, 580–81, 599, 668–69, 724 Lovett and, 417–18, 465–66, 493–94, 509, 539, 542, 544–46, 549, 556, 581, 592–93, 594, 716–17 McCloy and, 186, 324–25, 334, 493, 513–15, 518, 592, 614 memoirs of, 22, 51, 54, 126, 136, 393, 530, 537–39, 548, 656, 679, 693, 716, 720–21, 724 mustache of, 132, 465, 547, 652, 697 pragmatism of, 126, 128, 136, 137–38, 323, 686, 697 press conferences of, 323, 372, 409–10, 412–13, 490 press coverage of, 368, 409, 494, 506, 545, 581, 646, 681 problem-solving technique of, 324 school years of, 22, 30, 39–40, 54–57, 80, 85–89 speeches of, 133, 135, 136, 185, 339–40, 360, 368, 394–95, 409–10, 428, 477–78, 488, 491, 506, 530, 547, 598, 610, 612 Acheson, Edward C, 50–53, 134 Acheson, Eleanor Gooderham, 51, 53, 55 Acheson, Jane, 418, 708 Acheson, Margot, 53, 86 Achilles, Thodore, 447 Adams, John Quincy, 29 Adams, Sherman, 577 Adenauer, Konrad, 201, 513, 514, 516, 517–18 Agee, James, 315–16 Aiken, George, 685 air power, Lovett’s commitment to, 18, 21, 91–92, 202–9 Allison, John, 528 Alsop, Joseph, 171, 409, 431–32, 453, 463, 545, 546, 581, 623, 643, 698 Alsop, Stewart, 546 “American Century, The” (Luce), 25 Americans for Democratic Action, 27 Amherst College, 68–70 Andropov, Yuri, 20, 728–29 Anglo–American coalition, Churchill’s iron curtain speech and, 362–64 “Anton Chekhov and the Bolsheviks” (Kennan), 154 Arden (Harrimans’ estate), 43–45, 63, 106–7, 285 arms control, 435, 577, 737 Acheson on, 33, 324–26, 356–62 espionage and, 327–28, 357 Lilienthal proposal for, 358–59 McCloy on, 357–62, 599 Stimson on, 303, 318–21, 324, 325–26 Truman and, 325–26, 342–46 see also nuclear test ban arms race, 34, 435–36, 553, 722–23 Armstrong, Hamilton Fish, 385, 420 Arneson, Gordon, 487 Arnold, Henry (“Hap”), 194, 201, 206, 458 Astor, Vincent, 113, 193 Atlantic Conference (1941), 210–12, 237 atom bomb, 18–19 Berlin blockade and, 460 East–West cooperation on, 33, 302–5, 318–21, 324, 325–28, 343–45, 385 Harriman on, 379 Hiroshima attacked, 314–16, 485 Interim Committee on, 274–75, 293, 294–95, 297, 302, 304, 310–11 Kennan on use of, 375, 435–36, 553, 722–23 McCloy on use of, 293–97, 300, 301, 303, 310–12, 315 Soviet Union and, 327–28, 480–81, 486–87, 489, 496 Stimson and, 271, 273–74, 277–78, 280–81, 293–97, 300, 301, 303–4, 308–13, 315, 318–21, 324–26, 327 testing of, 297, 301–2, 304–5, 310, 630–33 see also arms control; nuclear weapons atomic arms control covenant, 319–20 Atomic Energy Commission, 486 Attlee, Clement, 543 Auchincloss, Louis, 30, 673 Auschwitz, proposed bombing of, 200–201, 235–36 Austin, Warren, 523 Baldwin, Hanson, 315, 420 Baldwin, Ray, 53 Balkans, postwar spheres of influence in, 241–43, 246, 262 Ball, George, 207–8, 429–30, 484, 606, 628 Acheson and, 648–49, 674, 697 Harriman and, 657 Johnson and, 643, 645–46, 648–49 Vietnam War and, 637–39, 643, 647–49, 680, 700, 711 Baltimore Sun, 134, 137 Barry, Philip and Ellen, 109 Bartlett, Charles, 639 Baruch, Bernard, 264n, 360–61 Battle, Lucius, 478–79, 491, 494, 532–33, 563, 612, 685, 697 Bay of Pigs invasion (1961), 574–75, 612, 622 Beale, Joseph, 71, 93 Bears in the Caviar (Thayer), 168 Beaverbrook, William Maxwell Aitken, Lord, 212–14, 217, 234, 603 Belmont, August, 484 Benchley, Robert, 109–10 Benét, Stephen Vincent, 80–81 Berger, Sam, 711–12 Beria, Lavrenty, 576 Berlin: devastation of, 386 Kennan in, 147–48, 152, 177–78, 190 Lovett’s peace offensive in, 459–60 McCloy in, 305–6 Soviet blockade of, 455–61, 472–73 Berlin, Isaiah, 579 Berlin airlift, 458–61 Berlin crisis (1961), 600, 605 Acheson and, 606, 609–16 Bohlen and, 615 J.


pages: 479 words: 144,453

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, Aaron Swartz, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chekhov's gun, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, computer age, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, European colonialism, experimental subject, falling living standards, Flash crash, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, low interest rates, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, ultimatum game, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

It is highly likely that networks controlling vital infrastructure facilities in the USA and many other countries are already crammed with such codes). However, we should not confuse ability with motivation. Though cyber warfare introduces new means of destruction, it doesn’t necessarily add new incentives to use them. Over the last seventy years humankind has broken not only the Law of the Jungle, but also the Chekhov Law. Anton Chekhov famously said that a gun appearing in the first act of a play will inevitably be fired in the third. Throughout history, if kings and emperors acquired some new weapon, sooner or later they were tempted to use it. Since 1945, however, humankind has learned to resist this temptation. The gun that appeared in the first act of the Cold War was never fired.


pages: 487 words: 147,891

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, colonial rule, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, forensic accounting, friendly fire, glass ceiling, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile

Idlewild had a maritime equivalent in 1990s Ukraine—Odessa. As I stroll along Primorsky Boulevard from Sergei Eisenstein’s famous steps toward the Opera House, Odessa looks magnificent as it hugs the northern Black Sea coast. Indeed, the recent reconstruction of the center is so evocative of a glamorous past that I can imagine Anton Chekhov, Isadora Duncan, and their fashionable friends sweeping in and out of the Londonskaya Hotel, where they used to stay. A century ago a visit to Odessa was de rigueur for the moneyed classes of Russia and Europe alike. This elegant illusion is maintained as I walk up Derebasovskaya Street, where peddlers are wooing tourists by performing with live snakes and crocodiles (less harmful than some of the other reptiles that creep around here).


pages: 547 words: 148,732

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

But the potential of the therapy has regulators and researchers and much of the mental health community feeling hopeful. “I believe this could revolutionize mental health care,” Watts told me. Her conviction is shared by every other psychedelic researcher I interviewed. * * * • • • “IF MANY REMEDIES are prescribed for an illness,” wrote Anton Chekhov, who was a physician as well as a writer, “you may be certain that the illness has no cure.” But what about the reverse of Chekhov’s statement? What are we to make of a single remedy being prescribed for a great many illnesses? How could it be that psychedelic therapy might be helpful for disorders as different as depression, addiction, the anxiety of the cancer patient, not to mention obsessive-compulsive disorder (about which there has been one encouraging study) and eating disorders (which Hopkins now plans to study)?


pages: 504 words: 147,660

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction by Gabor Mate, Peter A. Levine

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, corporate governance, drug harm reduction, epigenetics, gentrification, ghettoisation, impulse control, longitudinal study, mass immigration, megaproject, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, PalmPilot, phenotype, placebo effect, Rat Park, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), source of truth, twin studies, Yogi Berra

ALICE MILLER Breaking Down the Wall of Silence In the search for truth human beings take two steps forward and one step back. Suffering, mistakes and weariness of life thrust them back, but the thirst for truth and stubborn will drive them forward. And who knows? Perhaps they will reach the real truth at last. ANTON CHEKHOV The Duel AUTHOR’S NOTE The persons, quotes, case examples and life histories in this book are all authentic; no embellishing details have been added and no “composite” characters have been created. To protect privacy, pseudonyms are used for All my patients, except for two people who directly requested to be named.


A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Anton Chekhov, glass ceiling, security theater, stakhanovite

the Count ventured after a brief silence. “Yes,” said Mishka with a careless wave of his hat. “But I came a day early at Shalamov’s request. . . .” An acquaintance from their university days, Viktor Shalamov was now the senior editor at Goslitizdat. It was his idea to have Mishka edit their forthcoming volumes of Anton Chekhov’s collected letters—a project that Mishka had been slaving over since 1934. “Ah,” said the Count brightly. “You must be nearly done.” “Nearly done,” Mishka repeated with a laugh. “You’re quite right, Sasha. I am nearly done. In fact, all that remains is to remove a word.” Here is what had unfolded: Early that morning, Mikhail Mindich had arrived in Moscow on the overnight train from Leningrad.


pages: 562 words: 153,825

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State by Barton Gellman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, active measures, air gap, Anton Chekhov, Big Tech, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, Debian, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, financial independence, Firefox, GnuPG, Google Hangouts, housing justice, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, off-the-grid, operational security, planetary scale, private military company, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Robert Gordon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, standardized shipping container, Steven Levy, TED Talk, telepresence, the long tail, undersea cable, Wayback Machine, web of trust, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

“if revealed, would cause”: Paul Ohm, “Don’t Build a Database of Ruin,” Harvard Business Review, August 23, 2012, https://hbr.org/2012/08/dont-build-a-database-of-ruin. Chekhov’s famous admonition: The best-known version is: “If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act.” Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). Chekhov meant that a playwright should not break an implicit promise to the audience, but the expectations behind that promise have their roots in observed experience of the world. Most weapons are used eventually. In surveillance as in war, capabilities once invented are put to use.


pages: 532 words: 141,574

Bleeding Edge: A Novel by Thomas Pynchon

addicted to oil, AltaVista, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Burning Man, carried interest, deal flow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, eternal september, false flag, fixed-gear, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, index card, invisible hand, jitney, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, margin call, messenger bag, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, Y2K

And he’s out the door. Maxine and Tallis stand looking at each other. The King croons on. “I was going to advise ‘Dump him,’” Maxine pensive, “while shaking you back and forth . . . but now I think I’ll just settle for the shaking part.” • • • HORST IS NODDED OUT on the couch in front of The Anton Chekhov Story, starring Edward Norton, with Peter Sarsgaard as Stanislavski. Maxine tries to tiptoe on into the kitchen, but Horst, not being domestic, tuned to motel rhythms even in his sleep, flounders awake. “Maxi, what the heck.” “Sorry, didn’t mean to—” “Where’ve you been all night?” Not yet having slid far enough into delusion to answer this literally, “I was hanging out with Tallis, she and the schmuck just parted ways, she’s got a new place, she was happy to have some company.”


pages: 1,331 words: 163,200

Hands-On Machine Learning With Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems by Aurélien Géron

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, backpropagation, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't repeat yourself, duck typing, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, iterative process, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, machine translation, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NP-complete, OpenAI, optical character recognition, P = NP, p-value, pattern recognition, pull request, recommendation engine, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, SpamAssassin, speech recognition, stochastic process

Thanks to Grégoire Mesnil, who reviewed Part II and contributed very interesting practical advice on training neural networks. Thanks as well to Eddy Hung, Salim Sémaoune, Karim Matrah, Ingrid von Glehn, Iain Smears, and Vincent Guilbeau for reviewing Part I and making many useful suggestions. And I also wish to thank my father-in-law, Michel Tessier, former mathematics teacher and now a great translator of Anton Chekhov, for helping me iron out some of the mathematics and notations in this book and reviewing the linear algebra Jupyter notebook. And of course, a gigantic “thank you” to my dear brother Sylvain, who reviewed every single chapter, tested every line of code, provided feedback on virtually every section, and encouraged me from the first line to the last.


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

Like all organisms, we metabolize energy and resources in a highly efficient way in order to combat the continuous fight against the inevitable production of entropy in the form of waste products and dissipative forces that cause physical damage. As we begin to lose the multiple localized battles against entropy we age, ultimately losing the war and succumbing to death. Entropy kills. Or as the great Russian playwright Anton Chekhov poignantly remarked, “Only entropy comes easy.” A central feature of how life is sustained is the transportation of metabolic energy through space-filling networks across all scales to service and feed cells, mitochondria, respiratory complexes, genomes, and other functional intracellular units, as symbolized here.


The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii Plokhy

affirmative action, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, language acquisition, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Sinatra Doctrine, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Transnistria

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, German reunification under way, and Mikhail Gorbachev adopting the “Sinatra doctrine,” which allowed Moscow’s East European clients to “do it their way” and eventually leave the Kremlin’s embrace, the conflict at the core of the Cold War was resolved. Soviet troops began to leave East Germany and other countries of the region. But the nuclear arsenals were virtually unaffected by these changes in the political climate. The famous Russian playwright Anton Chekhov once remarked that if there was a gun onstage in the first act of a play, it would be fired in the next. The two superpowers had placed plenty of nuclear arms on the world stage. Sooner or later there would be a second act involving different actors who might want to fire them. Nuclear arms were an integral element of the Cold War, responsible both for its most dangerous turns and for the fact that the two superpowers, the first to possess atomic weapons, never entered into a direct, open conflict—the risk of nuclear annihilation was too great.


pages: 603 words: 182,826

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

That level of lending gave each landowner’s property in European Russia, from peasant to Grand Duke, an average capital value of about ten rubles or fifteen dollars an acre. By chance, that was almost exactly the value of land in the United States according to the 1850 census, a period when its rural economy was beginning to turn on the afterburners of industrialization. Writing at the same time as Lenin but with rather more humanity, Anton Chekhov gently lamented and laughed at the impact of this increasingly energetic, capitalist use of land on the Oblomovan outlook of old-fashioned aristocrats. In The Cherry Orchard, the past is represented by the charming fecklessness of the orchard’s owner, Madame Ranevskaya, who is incapable of dealing with the fact that the land must be sold off to pay her debts; the future is the emotionally inept Lopahkin, the family’s former serf, now a wealthy businessman, who buys the estate and chops down the cherry trees to build vacation homes.


pages: 685 words: 203,949

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

In the extreme, an encyclopedia entry could tell you every possible fact about a person or place, leaving nothing out—but such an entry would be too unwieldy to be useful. The usefulness of most professional summaries is that someone with perspective has used their best judgment about what, in the scheme of things, should be included. The person most involved in editing the entry on Charles Dickens may have no connection to the person writing the entry on Anton Chekhov, and so we end up with idiosyncratic articles that don’t give equivalent weight to their lives, their works, their influences, and their historical place. For scientific, medical, and technical topics, even in peer-reviewed journals, the information sources aren’t always clearly on display.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Mooney 2005; see also Pinker 2008b. 6. Lamar Smith and the House Science Committee: J. D. Trout, “The House Science Committee Hates Science and Should Be Disbanded,” Salon, May 17, 2016. 7. J. Mervis, “Updated: U.S. House Passes Controversial Bill on NSF Research,” Science, Feb. 11, 2016. 8. From Note-book of Anton Chekhov. The quote continues, “What is national is no longer science.” 9. J. Lears, “Same Old New Atheism: On Sam Harris,” The Nation, April 27, 2011. 10. L. Kass, “Keeping Life Human: Science, Religion, and the Soul,” Wriston Lecture, Manhattan Institute, Oct. 18, 2007, https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/2007-wriston-lecture-keeping-life-human-science-religion-and-soul-8894.html.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

Later members included the Barrymores, Frank Sinatra, and (oddly) Sir Winston Churchill, while more recent inductees are Morgan Freeman and Liv Ullmann.These days it seems to be the club that is trying to keep regular society out – rather than vice versa. The club does, however, host a year-round program of lunch-hour theater called UNION S QUARE , GRAM E RC Y PARK | The Flatiron District Food for Thought, featuring one-act plays by writers as diverse as Anton Chekhov and Tony Kushner and supplemented by a light buffet lunch. The program often feels more like an exclusive salon featuring marquee-name actors, making advance booking highly recommended (shows twice per week on Mon, Wed, Thurs, or Fri; lunch 12.30pm, show 1.30pm; $75; T 212/362-2560, W www.foodforthought productions.com).


pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

When his company announced that it would abandon a strategy of making good products in favor of a “desperate strategy of mergers, business spin-offs, fruitless partnerships, and random reorganizations” and an accelerated “program of paying the good employees to leave,” the stock price went up by three points.32 CHAPTER 35 Deliberate or Emergent If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure. —Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard THE QUESTION OF whether senior management really could give a business strategic direction was turned into one of the more influential dichotomies in the field, that between deliberate or emergent strategies. Henry Mintzberg, who was responsible for the most sustained challenge to the so-called design model of strategy, stressed the possibility of a continuing, intelligent learning response to a changing environment.


pages: 1,041 words: 317,136

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, fear of failure, housing crisis, index card, industrial research laboratory, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, strikebreaker, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment

He knew that for Dirac life was physics and nothing else; by contrast, his own interests were extravagantly catholic. He still loved French literature, and while in Göttingen he found time to read Paul Claudel’s dramatic comedy Jeune Fille Violaine, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story collections, The Sensible Thing and Winter Dreams, Anton Chekhov’s play Ivanov and the works of Johann Hölderlin and Stefan Zweig. When he discovered that two friends were regularly reading Dante in the original Italian, Robert disappeared from Göttingen’s cafés for a month and returned with enough Italian to read Dante aloud. Dirac was unimpressed, grumbling, “Why do you waste time on such trash?


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Moscow’s Muir and Mirrielees delivered across the Russian empire from Poland to Vladivostok, as long as items were worth 50 roubles or more. In 1894, the Bon Marché distributed 1.5 million catalogues, half to the provinces, another 15 per cent abroad. It sent packages worth 40 million francs a year to provincial towns and villages.91 Pieces of urban fashion and comfort could be had thousands of miles away from the metropole. When Anton Chekhov was recovering from tuberculosis in Yalta in the late 1890s, he continued to get his hats, detachable collars, curtains and stoves from Muir and Mirrielees.92 American writers, preoccupied with the melting pot, have emphasized the role of the department store in fusing a new national identity.